Critical Patch Issued By Microsoft

Symantec comments on the light patch release from Microsoft and advises IT Administrators to address the critical bulletin

Microsoft has issued two security bulletins which address three vulnerabilities. Just one of these vulnerabilities has been rated critical by Microsoft.

“The critical Microsoft Data Access Components vulnerability is one of two MDAC issues fixed this month,” said Joshua Talbot, security intelligence manager, Symantec Security Response. “These components are a collection of technologies that enable applications – both from Microsoft and third-party developers – to access and manipulate databases.”

“The patch for the critical vulnerability corrects a problem in the way MDAC validates memory allocation,” Talbot added. “The other patch fixes an issue – marked as important – in the way MDAC validates third-party usage of a Microsoft API. Both vulnerabilities can be exploited by drive-by download, meaning simply viewing a legitimate site that has been compromised by an attacker can lead to a user’s machine being exploited.”

“The vulnerability in the Backup Manager DLL that was also patched has exploit code publicly available, but we haven’t seen any attacks attempt to use it in the wild,” Talbot concluded. “Because an exploit would require a user to take some fairly uncommon steps – such as opening up a Windows backup or ‘.wbcat’ file from an SMB or WebDAV server – it’s less appealing as an attack vector than other vulnerabilities out there that require much less of the user.”

Symantec strongly encourages users to patch their systems against all vulnerabilities addressed this month.